Images having ALT tags is a good thing — this allows those dinosaurs who still use lynx to get a description of an image, assuming the content provider has decided to provide an accurate description of the image’s contents. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and ALT tag contents are often woefully inadequate and suffer from the oft-humorous ambiguity of our human languages. Consider this picture from the front page of the BBC site, pointing to their story Bush accused of anti-gay Stance. When it was loading in Firefox, I got to see the ALT tag briefly. The full tag reads: “Gay couple smell flowers prior to their planned wedding in San Francisco.” The only thing that displayed in the small space taken up by the image was “Gay couple smell.”